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WILLIAM H. PRITCHARD
ably with Lawrence's essays and reviews that Lewis' critical work can
best be compared. Both men practice criticism by fits and starts since
something else important is forever intruding into their not-so-well–
turned essays. Both are exceedingly - for some, excessively - per–
sonal critics who excel in reading between the lines to bring out the
assumptions which underlie them. Once there, the assumptions often
being .anathema, they are subjected to an aggressive irony that moves
toward exposure of the falsity or vulgarity of the book. And so per–
haps it is fitting that each typed the other as a slave, respectively, of
the intellect and the blood, and bracketed the other with an inferior,
more slavish partisan of those causes?
Lewis
is
always linked with Pound and Eliot as, in polite terms,
men of the Right; his differences from them are just as interesting,
and more significant insofar as they bear on literature. On the other
hand, it has not been noted that his critical work has profound af–
finities with the literary-sociological "liberal" interests of Leavis and
the
Scrutiny
group in its early years. Although Leavis immortalizes
him in the Richmond lecture as "the brutal and boring Wyndham
Lewis," they were stalking many of th,e same enemies and tendencies
in the years around
1930.
With regard to the Sitwells, or Arnold
Bennett's book-reviewing or the Joyce-cult, they spoke as one voice
while officially either ignoring or dismissing each other.2 Finally,
although the usefulness of his criticism does not have to be defended
on historical grounds, Lewis' ability to speak out fully and suggestively
on
Ulysses
in
1927,
or on Pound's work in progress in the same year,
1 In
Phoenix
(1936) Lawrence couples Lewis with Aldous Huxley as smart
young men. Lewis attacks Lawrence along with Sherwood Anderson in
Pale/ace
( 1929) .
2 Lewis' sarcastic treatment of Lawrence would not make for much com–
munication between Leavis and Lewis, especially since T. S. Eliot used Lewis'
account by way of criticizing Lawrence. In "Mr. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis and
Lawrence" (1936) Leavis allows Lewis "undeniable talent" but finds him ab–
solutely unfit to criticize Lawrence. After an intelligent review by Douglas Garman
of some minor Lewis books in the early thirties, his literary work went unreviewed
and unnoticed by
Scrutiny
-
evidently the "undeniable talent" didn't demand
much confrontation. From material in the Lewis archive at Cornell University it
seems that he became angry at Mrs. Leavis for not mentioning him in
Fiction
and the Reading Public
(1932) as a useful analyst of contemporary literary
culture. He speaks of the Leavises either as a late offshoot of the Bloomsbury
tree
(!)
or, in the preface to
Men Without Art
(1934), as an "appendix" to I. A.
Richards. After these wild swings he remained silent.
